There's gonna be (another) tweet off

Hello Folks,

I'm going to run another tweet off tonight on twitter, using the hash tag #HLtweetoff. I'll set challenges from 6:00pm every half hour until 9:00pm. And in and amongst plug the humour league site. The idea is to come up with as many funny tweets as you can on a specific theme, e.g. Knock knock jokes.

Tonight I was going to run a caption competition for one round, so if you have any suggestions for pictures, please mail me a link.

It would be great if you could join in. I found it really got the joke-writing juices flowing doing it last week. My personal favourite was:

KNOCK KNOCK tweet
Who's there?
A bird with big knockers.

Yes, well, if you do it, you'll be funnier than me. Rob was hilarious last week. And the whole thing was a lot more fun when I wasn't just playing with myself so to speak.

If you're not on twitter yet, just get yourself an account at www.twitter.com and follow me at @Mark_Stringer.

Regards,

Mark.
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Junking your software development team (a flavour of my idea for a book - "Late and Over-Budget")

I get this idea of “junking” from my pitiful thin understanding of the world of finance. As I understand it, some guy (I think he ended up in jail) found out that certain kinds of bonds called “fallen Angels” performed better than they were expected to perform. There were corporate bonds, where the corporations that had issued them had got into some kind of trouble (like borrowing too much) and so their bonds had become doubtful in the eyes of the market. When people in big suits with loud voices started trading these bonds, they started to call them “Junk Bonds”. Well for a while, this guy made a lot of money trading in these bonds. But there weren’t that many of them.  So then he had a brainwave!  Why not artificially  make the bonds in a company risky.  Why not make lots of “junk bonds.” The way they do this with bonds is something called “leveraged buy-out.” Which I think involves buying the company with a loan secured on the company’s stock, or something like that, this really is the extent of my knowledge, whatever you do, don’t take financial advice from me.

This is what seems to happen to succeeding development teams - they get junked. What do I mean by that?  I mean that if a team starts to deliver valuable software in a timely fashion, the first instincts of management will be to break it.  There are a couple of ways to break it.  Give it *lots* more to do e.g. if the team’s velocity is 50, insist that if they give luxuries like toilet breaks and coffee breaks and lunch breaks, well then it should be possible to get it up to 100. Lets say you’ve got a backlog, and, given the experiences of previous iterations and releases, everybody is agreed that there’s a 95% chance that you’ll deliver this on time.  Well hell! In that case, let’s add a load more stuff until the chances of it all being delivered are only 50%, or less. Hence, overnight, a “successful” team becomes a failing team. Another way to break a successful team is to literally break it.  Split it into 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 pieces (I’ve hear all of these suggested).  If you were really serious about doing this, the way to do it would probably be gradually increase the size of the performing team and then split it.  Or rotate people from other teams in and out of the team (you’re doing pair programming - right?)  Or, even better (i.e. much worse) give everybody on the successful team another job, so that they’re now only “75%, 50%, or even 30% working on the successful team.

Now the really clever/cynical/jaded amongst you might have realised by this point that there is an obvious lesson that comes from this. Never ever (or certainly, very rarely) give the impression that you are on time and to budget, it will result in your carefully built-up team structures being either broken up or being overloaded to the point of breaking. Junk your projects before anybody else gets the chance. Perform your own leveraged buy out.  This doesn’t actually have to be as cynical as it sounds.  All it means is that you maintain a strong understanding of what the business priority is for the backlog, so that you really are delivering value to clients. Also, maintain a realistic understanding of what the velocity is through that backlog, so that it’s clear in your mind which bits are unlikely to get done in a particular timeframe. Then, crucially make sure that your team is clear that no matter what gets said in senior management pep talks they should work at a sustainable pace (set an example, keep reasonable office hours yourself).

Now, I’ve just tweeted a quote from this post, and it’s attracted a couple of re-tweets and a couple tweets suggesting that I’m being very “negative.” So this might be a good time to warn of the dangers of being this “negative” openly.  Michael Milken went to jail.  Some say that he did nothing other than countenance a certain kind of “negative” thinking.  This is similar to the bizarre hatred for “short sellers.” The truth is people don’t like negative thinking.  So admitting that your aim is ever going to be anything other than “on time and to-budget” may be dangerous for your career. Even so that doesn’t mean as a scrum master/project manager, you can’t have a more “mature” and subtle approach. 

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There's Gonna Be a Tweet Off

I'm arranging a comedy Tweet-Off tonight on Twitter from 6pm to 9pm. I'll set challenges and the person who gets the most likes, favourites and RTs for a tweet on the theme will wins the round. First prize will be - erm, some fame on twitter. The aim is to showcase the talents of my buddies in http://www.facebook.com/HumourLeague, but it's an open competition and anybody is welcome to join in. Look for the hash tag #HLTweetOff around 6pm tonight UK time. 

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Tonight's routine

Hello.  It’s good to be back! I’ve been in America.  And guess what? I got fatter! I mean I was fat before I left but now I’m huge.  It isn’t just none of my clothes fit me, no clothes fit.  Anything I put on, I feel like humpty dumpty wearing a size 8 bikini.

Thing is, in America, the food portions are huge! Everything in American is huge and spaced out. The offices are really spaced out.  When you got within twenty feet of somebody in the corridor they’d stop and say “excuse me.” And I think that’s because they’d got a huge personal space, either that or it’s like the thing – you know they say Chinese people say westerners smell of cheese, it might just be that I’m English and I smell of despair.

There’s no way I’m ever going to be as positive as these people. They ask you how you are and you say “I’m alright” – and they look at you like you’ve just done this huge negativity fart.  You ask Americans how they are, they’re “Awesome!” or “Excellent” or one guy I heard “VERY EXCELLENT.  This really did happen to me, I walked into a coffee shop and the guy at the counter said “Good afternoon sir – I hope you achieved everything you wanted to achieve today.”  And it did cross my mind to say “Well I did manage to restrain myself from punching  a barista in the face.”

But the cruel trick that America plays on you is giving you the impression that they’re speaking the same language.  I kept going to this Mall, I don’t know why I kept going there because nobody understood a fucking word I said.  And the feeling was mutual.  I think it’s particularly bad when you understand all the individual words, but you know you’ve absolutely no idea what they mean when they’re joined up together.  For instance.  I bought some T-shirts in a clothes shop and when I got to the tills, the woman at the till said to me “Did you get help in the mens.” That’s what she said “Did you get help in the mens.”  Now, I must explain at this point, the reason I was buying a new T-shirt was because I’d spilt Iced tea all down myself in the Japanese restaurant. And this was even more confusing because I was intending to go to the Gents and change into one of these T-shirts, just as soon as I’d managed to buy one. So I was really confused part of me was interpreting what she was saying as “Did your mother dress you? You retard.”  And part of me was thinking “Is she really saying that if I was gay and went cottaging, I’d be even so useless at that, I’d need someone to show me how to give a blow job?” But of course another part of me was thinking “That’s not likely is it? I mean she’s a shop assistant, she’s being polite.”  Anybody guess what she was asking?  Yeah, that’s right.  To which I replied “No! I managed all by myself!!!” Nary a titter.  I suppose it might have been funnier if I didn’t have the big Iced T stain on my shirt.

And, I can tell this – I checked with Ming and I don’t think it’s racist.  Just before I bought the T-shirts and got accused of maladroit toilet trading, I’d been at the Teriyaki stand in the food court.  And I ordered my chicken Teriyaki and the Japanese lady said to me “Boiwed Wice or Fwied Wice.”  Look I’m not being a hideous racist.  I promise you that’s actually what she said.  And I must admit at first, I was a bit confused and I asked her to repeat it and she said “Boiwed Wice of Fwied Wice.”  But then I got it and said, confidently, “I’ll have FRIED RICE PLEASE.” And she was “What? What you want? I don’t unnerstand?”

“FRIED RICE PLEASE.”

“I don’t unnerstand.”

“Er, I’m sorry, what was the question.” She thinks for a second.

“STEAMED WICE or fwied wice.”

“Oh fuck it, I’ll have the day-old sushi.”

 

But you start to get paranoid.  Well, I actually I start to get paranoid, you’d probably be fine.  But you start to worry you can’t find shoe polish is a supermarket that’s about the size of Wales and you start to worry that you’d ask for “shoe polish” and they’d say “I’m sorry” and you’d say “shoe polish” and they’d say “I’m sorry.” And you say “you know the stuff you put on shoes to make them shiny.” And they say “Oh! You mean COBBLER’S JISM.”

And you say “Yes! Yes! Oh God! No, NO, NO!!!”

Thanks very much, goodnight.

 

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I'm not reading this

Joanna Field - A Life of One's Own Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

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There are worse places to sit and write

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On my table in Caffe Nero

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Testing testing: a response to http://stream.red56.co.uk/post/24561863889/just-too-much-quality

Hey Tim - this is a very interesting post.  I'm tempted to try to write a structured response, but I'm worried in the process I'm going to miss crucial things that I want to say.  So I'll just jot down some headings.

Quality is a trade-off.

This is what tends to get forgotten when people talk about quality, as you say.  I think it would be hugely beneficial if we could some how make these "trade-off"s more explicit.  As I was reading through this it seemed to me like it would be a good idea to draw some diagrams.  Draw some graphs and ask each team to "pin the tail on the donkey."  But how do you decided where along a continuum to decide on quality?  Maybe you can't/don't.  Maybe you use some outside signal.

What's the signal?

It strikes me that in something like the Toyota production system they have a few ways of signalling whether quality is hitting the sweet spot or not.  The big one is "Is the production line moving."  If it isn't, well then there's a problem that needs fixing.  Another is that they build deep, close, long-term relationships with their customers so that they have a good idea what they actually think of the product.  I'm not sure how exactly that gets fed back, but I remember reading from the Womack and Jones books that that aspect of the Toyota approach is one of the hardest for Western Companies to accept, let alone mimic.

I talked to some guys once from one of the price comparison sites and they told me that they'd got rid of their QA guys and replaced them with a focus on the conversion rate for the site (the overall number of people who switch suppliers as a result of visiting the site).  They added a new piece of functionality, if the conversion rate went up, they either left it alone or maybe looked at providing more improvements in that area.  If the conversion rate went down, they either pulled it or changed it.  Of course, I'm guessing, getting rid of the QA guys probably didn't make the developers more callous about testing for obvious defects, quite the reverse.

What you need to be asking with quality - maybe, is what's the signal that tells us we've got enough?  Is it really when there are no defects? 

Standards

In some recent Agile transformations I've repeatedly heard "what's the standard." Because software isn't in the quadrant of the Cynefin framework  where standards are useful, because Alastair Cockburn is exactly right that we need to have a methodology for every project  standards are very often a waste of time. Or possibly they are just at the wrong level of focus.  What if your standard said something like "1) Identify as a project what the signal is that tells you whether quality is 'good enough' 2) develop in adherence to this signal 3) inspect and adapt - change the signal, improve the clarity and communication of that signal.  Would that be OK?

Poke Yoke

"Special" characters. How many defects do you see that are related to special characters?  Some of them no so special, like apostrophes.  Would it be worth just writing a special characters test for every text field, or having access to some kind of library that tried to do put mad, malicious text in a field, as a starting point?  This would be a Poke Yoke approach to testing and chimes in with the W Edwards Deming concept of the red bean game.  Every defect tells us that our approach is wrong in some way, that our system for generating code needs improving - how can we improve it.

Money and Sense

You said this to me, and I'm not quite sure that you knew what you were saying, but I've  come up with an interpretation of it that I find hugely satisfying. I was reading "Grunch of Giants" and telling you about what Buckminster Fuller says, right at the beginning of that book - "You can either make money or sense."  And you said something like "Yes, but being a really skilled craftsman, that's a kind of nonsense."

And I don't know whether you meant this or not, but I took that to mean "maybe you can choose what kind of nonsense you use to make that money." Maybe.  

Rephrasing this - one approach to success is to be "insane" about something, to pay insane attention to something.  I think this is what the electricity bill switching quys were doing.  They were becoming insanely interested and sensitive to the conversation rate. Maybe one way of thinking about what Toyota are doing is "become insanely interested in making cars that their customers want at the rate of demand." What sorts of things could you be insane about? Agile process. Customer satisfaction? Visual design, code quality, defect rates. In a way, appeals to "good enough" are appeals to money rather than sense and so to non-sense rather than sense. They're saying "look, you will never be able to show logically that the code does exactly what it's supposed to do logically.  And anyway, actually, what's supposed to do is make money." My feeling is that you probably can't be insane about more than one thing at once.  But if you are insane about something, you might make even more money.

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On Disagreeing with People

I read this a while ago and it bothered me. 

Is this guy's dad right?  Are we a generation that's going to deal with conflict poorly?  Although this guy's dad strikes me as the kind of person you probably don't argue with, you could possibly point out to him that the generations that pre-dated the internet manage the first world war, the second world war, Vietnam, the first Gulf war.  So it's not exactly as if this generation is plummeting head first off a mountain of conflict resolution wisdom and achievement.

Conflict, disagreement, difficult communication. Even though I've read a lot about this, talked a lot about this - even given talks about this , I still feel that I'm in the early stages of understanding what do and how to deal with it when people disagree with me. So this is not going to be a well-structured article.  It's going to be a set of notes and thoughts about my personal reaction to disagreement.

One thought is something that I read in this amazing book "Provocative Therapy." One of things that Frank Farrelly says in this book is something like - everybody is understandable.  I mean you could take issue with this and say that some really crazy people aren't comprehensible.  But that's not the truth for most of the pained "crazy" people that Farrelly works with and it certainly isn't true for most of the people that you and I disagree with.  These people are understandable.  You may not understand some intricate detail about their motivation, or their precise world view, but you mostly get the gist.  And - I'm wondering, dare I say this, very often, I think part of the thing that makes you so annoyed, so enraged with the people who disagree with you is that you think they might be right.

Lets just go over one example that isn't controversial, I'm going to chicken out of the VERY controversial one, although I might just mention it and run away.

I got into an argument yesterday with somebody - lets call her ANNE - about whether it's a good idea to give people as much work as you know they can handle or far more than you know they can handle.

Example 1:

ANNE: I'm a bit worried we're not giving people enough to do.

ME: What's your worry?  If they finish this, we can give them some more. 

ANNE: Yes, but some people are lazy. If we don't give them a lot of things to do, they might slack off.

ME: If you've got lazy people on the team, you really think you can make them NOT lazy by giving them a bigger list of things to do?

ANNE: Maybe - I think it's worth a try.

Do you know what makes me so OUTRAGED about this? Do you know what makes me furious about this?  That even though I have tried the techniques known as "Limiting Work In Progress" and know that it results in work actually getting finished quicker and with much better clarity about how project is doing.  Even though I know that the alternative being proposed by ANNE - a huge long to do list - results in lack of focus and no clarity about how things are going (a very good situation for a lazy person who wants to hide). Even though this strategy results in a huge long list of started things and very few finished things - exactly the opposite of what someone who says they want "to get things done" would want.  In spite of all of this, there is a tiny little part of me that suspects she might be right. I don't agree with Anne's position - but I do understand it, this is the scary thing - EVEN THOUGH IT'S COUNTER TO ALL MY OWN EXPERIENCE!!!  ARGHHH!!!

Example 2:

And - this is the example I said I might shy away from - there's a similar kind of logic to arguments against immigration.  I live with an immigrant. I live in possibly the world's most cosmopolitan city - London.  I love it.  I also grew up in an all-white, mono-cultural, ghetto in rural West Yorkshire which was insufferable.  I desperately remember a friend of mine being racially abused for being the granddaughter of a Latvian - "You're not even white!" I know that when the Germans looked at the possibility of kicking Turkish gastarbeiter out of Germany in the late 80's - early 90's they drew the conclusion that it would result in economic disaster. But.  But. I am loathe to even admit it.  There is still a part of me that thinks "Hey, maybe this argument is right."  Maybe all the problems of the world are the fault of the out-group - the other. Even though I absolutely know that the argument is wrong, I understand it, and even understand why some people might think it's true. And you know what? The fact I even think this for a moment makes me even more angry and enraged at people who push these kind of opinions.

Just writing about these things feels like I'm performing major surgery on myself. I just want to share a few thoughts on these things.  Firstly, a lot of what's going on here in example 2 - lets take that first is covered in this brilliant book - "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion"    One of the most powerful motivators that we have, and one of the easiest ways we have of being controlled is what Cialdini calls "scarcity." Something I've noticed as a project manager is how much people love scarcity.  People love to fight over resources, space, meeting rooms, people for their teams, stationery. Senior managers love to arbitrate in disputes over scarce resources and feel left out if they're not asked.  When you see teams identify something as a scarce resource, it's as if you can see their shoulders drop with relaxtion.  "A scarce resource! We know how to play this game!!!"

Example 1 is a bit harder to deal with. It's certainly very hard to explain to someone who is venturing these kinds of opinions that we don't have very good intuitions about work, as a species we haven't been doing it very long (even if you count whoever built the pyramids) and we've been doing complicated knowledge work like software development for just over two generations. In such areas, what you feel intuitively probably isn't much of guide.  The powerful persuasive factors at work here are ones that are even more persuasive than scarcity. Combine these two together and they are sometimes even more powerful than the survival instinct. One of them is mentioned by Cialdini - the persuasive factor of doing what everybody else is doing.  "Everybody else is really busy all the time - so shouldn't we be? If we're busy, no one is going to ask us to explain ourselves, even if what we're doing is utter rubbish - or even counter-productive."  

But actually, you're dealing with a far more powerful compulsion - the urge to keep doing what you've always done. 

 OK, more on this later.  Just a couple of notes to myself where to pick up from with this: you're not actually arguing with these people, you're arguing with these urges, both in them and in yourself.

That's why the Buddhist concept of ahmisa - non violence - might be useful here, because when you attack these urges in others, you're also attacking yourself.

Is the only way to combat things that people do using "fast thinking", as in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow to re-cast them so that they encourage other kinds of fast thinking. The whole "Zen in the Art of Archery" idea is that you have to practice and practice and practice new techniques until they also come without thinking, just as scarcity and the desire to do what everybody else is doing does.

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In reply to @otfrom & @ptexpat about http://dannorth.net/2012/05/31/bdd-is-like-tdd-if/

I don't know a lot about BDD.  When I last heard someone talk about it, it sounded to me like it was an attempt by BA's to wrest control of the development process from developers (isn't driven, just another word for "controlled"), to somehow MAKE the developers write the right kind of tests rather than "lazy" hard-coded tests that would pass in the narrowest of cases. Sure this is some kind of smell.  It kind of reminds of intricate attempts to engineer workflow and fields and flags in Jira, the imagined aim being that nobody ever has to talk to each other ever again.  But maybe I'm caricaturing.  What I hope it is, is a bunch of tactics to make sure that the conversations that happen around a story are as rich and informative and useful as possible (specification by example, sounds like it might be something like this).

The truth is, if anybody has control of the process, if any stage of the process is "Driving" and is insensitive the vagaries of the other parts of the process, the process is in trouble because it isn't accruing vital information.  Everybody the whole length of the process needs to add value.

Similarly, I'm suspicious of anybody who claims that anything is "just" something else.

Both TDD and BDD need to be seen as tactics within an Agile, iterative, empirical, "inspect and adapt" strategy. If they are held up as strategies, they run the risk of encouraging the belief that the world isn't vague, complex and at least initially un-knowable, that we aren't always in software, working on the borders of the "Complex" and "Chaotic" sectors of the Cynefin framework.

Well, we are.

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More worrying...

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Worrying...

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